Are Boomers loving the boom?

Published 2:51 pm, Sunday, March 16, 2014

New York magazine takes on the question "Is San Francisco New York?" with a series of "dispatches," short essays they say are from "a city, newly flushed with wealth, that doesn't quite know what to do with itself." (Reading that from our perch on the West Coast, it sounds pretty condescending, as is the lead picture, two nudists standing outside a Google bus.)

Anyway, one of the best dispatches is from Daniel Alarcón, who, in writing about the Mission, describes a certain difficulty around here in pegging people according to stereotypical political positions. In other places, he writes, issues like gun control and same-sex marriage make it easy to categorize people.

In San Francisco, progressives overwhelmingly prevail on issues "that are fiercely debated elsewhere, and then gather once a year to march in a corporate-sponsored Pride Parade. In this context, how do you know where a person stands?"

Alarcón proposes a litmus test: a person's reaction to one word: "boom." "Do they use it to evoke a colorful futurist dream, or do they use it to imply destruction? Do they say it with a hint of awe, or as though they simply hope to survive it?"

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The 32nd edition of the Center for Asian American Media's CAAMFest movie festival opened at the Castro on Thursday, with the showing of "How to Fight in Six Inch Heels," director Ham Tran's comedy about a Vietnam-born New York fashion designer (played by producer-star Kathy Uyen) who, in order to spy on her boyfriend, becomes a high-fashion model in New York. The movie has a "Pygmalion" (plain Jane becomes siren) element, a "Gone With the Wind" element (manipulative woman messes up), as well as a "Devil Wears Prada" (meanies terrorize the innocents) element. The audience ate it up.

When he was 12, said not-tall Chiu, he wanted to be in the NBA. His mother, however, told him there would never be a Taiwanese immigrant "to go to Harvard and play in the NBA"; he took her advice and chose the Harvard path. There are five Asian Americans on the Board of Supervisors, he said, and the mayors of both San Francisco and Oakland are Asian Americans. "Folks," said Chiu, "we have taken over."

P.S.: Ten cast and crew members were onstage for the Q&A, the women statuesque in shoes almost as tall as those in the movie's title. In order not to shoot up at the stars' faces, said director Tran, "we made Bao (Nguyen), our cameraman, work in high heels. That's why everybody looks so pretty."

Norman Foster, the architect whose Foster+Partners has designed the planned huge doughnut-shaped Apple Campus 2 in Cupertino, told Architectural Record why a one-building campus - this one is a mile in circumference - is superior to a complex of buildings.

Foster is known for huge projects, including airport terminals in Hong Kong and Beijing. "If you compare these very large buildings in terms of the area enclosed by the amount of external wall, they're very efficient, so they consume less energy," he said. Large airport buildings work better than going from one structure to the next, because "You're not worrying about what the hell is happening to your bags. ... It's more sustainable, it's more economic. And architecturally, it's more interesting." Bags? I'm picturing Apple-ites toting nothing but their iPads.

Kristopher Brown's employer, Pestec, is under contract with the Public Utilities Commission's Waste Water Management program to make sure that we don't spend spring and summer slapping at our arms or (even worse) using a folded Chronicle as an instrument of death.

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